A Dog's Life

Rio is fitting in well in our crazy life though it does sometimes look like he would rather be swimming. He outweighs Fiona but she still has the upper hand as you can see.

Clay Bulls

Fiona was inspired by some claymation this morning and made this small family of clay bulls. In her words: "The peach coloured one is the mum. The dad is red, The baby is green. They all have yellow hair (Still pronounced lello)."

Fiona is just back from Pacific grove where she was safe from this week's Tsunami. Our boat is OK as we recently moved her to a new slip...the old slip is toast though.

Devon and I had a few days in Utah for a nursing class and some play...

Be well, Love Louise

Twinkle Twinkle Little Fiddle

Cupid's Cookies

Fiona participated fully in making valentines cookies this year and even chose the loveliest ones to go to our neighbour Joyce. The best part about cookies is sharing them around.

An Update

Just a quick pic of fiona before school today... Shortly afterwards she jumped on her trail-a-bike and followed Devon down the hill to school. Just before she passed out of sight I got a kiss blown in my general direction...what a sweetie!

Playing

I think that playing is a really important part of being a parent...While Devon and I were away playing in the snow, Fiona was up to the serious work of being a kid. She got to go horseriding, made a mess of the grandparent's living room, ate cartoon themed cereal, came home tired.

Hope that you are enjoying yourself too.
Love
Louise

A mother reeling

Just having trouble with how fast things change....

Fiddle Faddle

Her first performance! Fiona has started taking fiddle lessons, and today while biking home from her fiddle teacher's house we stopped to watch the surf along West Cliff Drive and she asked if she could play... so out came the fiddle and she played 'twinkle twinkle little star' for the people standing around, including two women who were very impressed.

Laundry

Our new year has started with a week of much needed sunshine and so we find ourselves on the first laundry day of the new year with Fiona taking charge. She has been helping with her laundry for about a year but she's getting better at it and even helped a visiting friend use the washing machine recently. Life is good.
Love
Louise

Zipping up the year...

Happy New Year to all our friends. It has been an interesting one filled with love, adventure, happiness ,and some sad bits. An admission at the end of the year...bedtime became quite a bit easier his past week as fiona started sleeping in a tent set up in her room. This tent to be exact. We look forward to 2011 and all the fun times ahead.

Love
Louise

fiona loves you (typed by Fiona herself)

The Visit

Here is Fiona once again shirking the knee, but nonetheless stoked at an opportunity to vouch for her recent behaviour. The thing she has asked for this year is a crib for her baby horse, made of wood (still needing assembly at this time). Hopefully santa will provide... hopefully there will not be a run on coal. Hopefully five will be easier than four.

Beach Bums

We are back from our travels. We spent a good chunk of November visiting family in Australia. Fiona visited with her 5 uncles, wonderful aunties, three cousins, Nanna and Grand-dad, as well as her Great Grandmother in a whirlwind three city extravaganza. We Loved staying with family and fiona has once again proved to be a great traveler. Jet lag once in Australia took her about a week to shift through and our first night back in our own beds had only one wake up at 11PM for a snack for her.

Thanks to everyone who took care of us in Sydney Brisbane and SA. Can't wait to return the favour.
Love
Louise

Uncle Jonathon in a Bookshop

At Nicks new studio with a Fiona Original

What you do to make a tired Kid eat

Flowers in Sydney

Feeding a Kangaroo

Helping Nanna Jane

WHat do you do on your vacation?

Brisbane crowd.

Kapunda Scene with uncle Chris

Spring Harvest

With Grand Dad Ken

Great Grandmother Beryl

At Uncle Nick's exhibit with Auntie Nikki: Fiona took this one

Halloween Song

Here is Fiona singing her newest song from preschool...in spanish of course.
Enjoy!
Louise

Sweet things

Sweet things that Fiona did for me while I've been sick this week:

• Brought me water to drink... so what if it was in a toy from the bath, it was still water... Hydration Hydration
  

• Took my temperature

• Covered me with a blanket.

• Cut out a picture of a pony for me to hold because that helps.

• Took my temperature again.

• Compared my temperature to hers and declared that I have "a hot bug."

• Suggested to me that I need sleep and love. "lots of love"

I think that she'll make a wonderful animal rescuer one day.

Pumpkins

Down jacket and sandals, santa cruz chic!

Fiona as pumpkin

We visited the pumpkin patch today. A storm is brewing tonight, Lucky to be warm and comfy inside. We picked out a modest pumpkin and will post a pic of the finished product after it is carved.
Thanks fro coming back to check the blog after so long.
Love always,
Louise

Back again... more to follow

After having complete computer breakdown followed by weeks of apathy and a hectic schedule we are back on line. I unplugged everything in a tiff, dragged our decrepit old computer down to the fix-it-guy, brought it home and plugged it back in and VOILA! we're back online.
I have so much to share including pictures of Mexico and Rio and Fiona. So Thanks for tuning back in!

Love
Louise

Rio

Two pics of Rio and the family because you cant get Fiona and him to look at the camera at the same time

Hi All,
Well the chaos of our summer subsided for a few days after Violetta went home to mexico and so, feeling like the house was a bit empty, we decided to get a puppy while reroofing and getting ready to paint the house.

As you can see we are all OK but our camera is still lost (maybe on the boat) and our computer is still broken(powersource?), hence the lack in recent posts, but we are happy nonetheless.

Rio is a buy, 8 weeks old yellow lab, and so we are working on the housebreaking and chewing/biting things at the moment. Fiona is happy to have a puppy around of course. I've never dealt with a male dog before, but true to form he spent the morning humping his pillow. He cries in the night a bit but we're hoping that settles after he adjusts to a new place.

Fiona is starting her final year of preschool and is one of the big kids there now...time flies. They have a new teacher there who speaks spanish. Fiona, having spent the summer speaking spanglish, feels confident with the new curriculum. She talks a lot about wanting to go to "Big Girl School" next year when she is five. Where did my little baby go?

Our autumn looks busy already and as we mourn the passing of summer we are looking forward to a trip to Mexico and a visit to Australia.

For now though you can find us puppy training and finishing our big house projects which also includes dealing with a new influx of rodents. I try to keep it in perspective and think about people through time who have designed their houses/kitchens/etc to try to outsmart mice...we still have some learning to do and indeed my latest plan is a motion sensor lazer mousetrap that vapourizes the mouse in an instant leaving a small easily wiped up pile of ash. I might need the venture capatilists involved and have yet to work out the energy karma.

Thanks for being devoted enough to check in on the blog after such a long hiatus.
Love Louise

Louise took the girls for a walk in the forest, both dressed as faeries of course!

Mountains Without Kayaks or Snowboards!

Super Sequoia (note handful of garbage)

So with a little persuading Devon agreed to going to the Sierras with no kayak or snowboard (ask him about the skateboard when his elbow and back feel better).

We took off out of the santa cruz fog for the weekend as we had forgotten what the sun felt like and headed to a place that one could kayak but instead camped sedately and lounged by Dinkey Creek in the Sierra National Forest, about 4 hours drive east of us.

It was beautiful and relaxing and most of all sunny. Fiona enjoyed camping including cooking on a little stove, sleeping in the back of the truck(we decided against the tent out of lazyness), and most of all playing in cool mountain streams and climbing granite.

We enjoyed the time away from real life. We all slept well. We saw amazing things like giant Sequoias more than 2000 years old and people-including children-who litter deliberately in our forests and rivers. We remembered old skills like openning wine bottles with a knife and unbogging a truck from fine sand in a remote location. It's great to pull out our skills again after so long around the house.

Driving back and forth was marred on the way there by our search for a fuel canister for our backpacking stove in Fresno where people are not so inclined, and on the way back with fionas' busy bladder. Lots of stops. But what can you do?

Beside the road in the valley

Sleeping in the truck

Fiona eating dinner al fresco

Above: Joy de Creek. and below: on granite.

The Sharing Report

We are about three weeks into the sharing experiment, and still no blood has been shed. There are good days and bad days as Fiona and Violetta try their best to share things bilingually. This morning there was a tiff over the who had which napkin at the breakfast table and who had the horse costume. All in all, its good.The girls play well together and the parents are getting used to a few more tantrums than they would prefer. Here is some photographic evidence of the good behaviour:


Both helping to blow out candles of devon's cupcakes, decorated of course by both

Both making cookies
and both pushing the stroller